Matt Cutts, on his Gadgets, Google and SEO blog, has been writing about how quickly the search engine is now updating its results.

Back in 2000, Cutts says, Google updated its index every few months, changing this to monthly halfway through that year. After an update in 2003, the search engine started to update its results incrementally, meaning that part of it index was updated on a daily basis.

Now, however, Google’s results are updated far more quickly – ‘minty fresh indexing’, according to Cutts. Cutts lauds his company’s indexing team for their success in creating crawlers that scour web in near real-time.

As search becomes more common place and people turn to Google to find the latest information, fresh indexing will not only become important, but also essential. According to Cutts: “I can’t imagine waiting over a month for search engines to update their index with news events any more, but just a few years ago that’s how things worked. And it only takes a few encounters with a fresh index until you ratchet up your expectations.”

Cutts cites the example of a blog post he was searching for being indexed within 45 minutes, as well as his won post, which was on Google.com within 30 minutes of publication.